(The Lion) — When the South Carolina Supreme Court abruptly ended South Carolina’s school choice program just weeks into the school year, Wendy Damron didn’t take things lying down.
Damron, who heads the Palmetto Promise Institute think tank, went right to work raising funds to keep kids enrolled who had started school expecting to receive scholarships.
Four months later, she’s raised more than $2.4 million of the $3 million needed to fund the scholarships this year, helping nearly 800 students remain in their chosen school.
For her work, the Heritage Foundation awarded Damron a 2025 Doer Award at its annual Awakening conference this month in Sea Island, Georgia.
“It was such an honor to be recognized by the Heritage Foundation,” Damron told The Lion. “They choose a handful of people that they think represent the values of Heritage and someone who sees a problem and takes action on it instead of waiting for someone else to come up with a solution or waiting for the government to come in.”
She attended last year’s conference to introduce Ellen Weaver, now the state’s education commissioner, who received the award for her work helping pass South Carolina’s school choice bill. One year later it was Damron being honored for her efforts to keep children in the program.
“We’ve had donations anywhere from $25 to $900,000 from a variety of people,” Damron said of her fundraising efforts, which she initiated just days after the court decision. “A lot of them have been from outside of South Carolina, people who saw these stories and their hearts went out to these families and they understood the bigger picture.
“If we have schools that are afraid to participate in the program going forward then you can have all the scholarships in the world but if you don’t have schools willing to participate then you don’t have a school choice program in your state.”
Damron’s work has also kept families engaged, many of whom felt betrayed after the court banned payments to private schools just weeks into the school year.
Legislation is advancing in the state General Assembly that would fund the school choice program through the lottery or other means designed to deal with the court’s objections. But Damron says the court’s membership shifted after the ruling was handed down and that the new court would likely agree with interpretations of the law that indirect payments from parents are not the same as direct government payments.
This matters because many states including South Carolina have laws on the books called Blaine Amendments that ban public money from going to private and religious institutions. But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that money directed by a parent for their child’s education at a private or religious school doesn’t count as a payment from the government, giving rise to educational savings accounts.
While she’s hopeful about new laws passing to save and even expand school choice, Damron is focused on raising the remaining $600,000 needed to fund all of the existing scholarships through the end of the school year. She has until late April, and is hopeful she won’t have to issue partial payments or ask schools to cover the missing dollars.
Some schools have only a few students on scholarship, but others have 10 or 20, she said.
Some families pulled out of the program after the court’s decision and before Damron’s rescue plan was announced, but she’s hopeful to rebuild trust so residents will keep using school choice. The program is accepting applications through March 15, although one legislative proposal would allow for receiving applications year-round.
“We will be doing an awareness campaign once the bill passes, letting people know the program’s up and running,” she says, adding the problems school choice has faced will only make any new program stronger and more effective.
“Now that we’ve lived through this experience, we can know where the roadblocks are,” Damron said. “We are better equipped. We can help these families through it better.”
